When comparing Pelican vs Publii, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Pelican is ranked 1st while Publii is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Quite fast even for sites with thousands of posts
Can spin up an build sites with thousands of articles in a matter of seconds even on very old computers.
Pro WordPress import
Pro Search engine form & SEO included
Pro Free and open source
WYSIWYG.
Pro Social media friendly (generates cards)
Cons
Con Theme inheritance doesn't seem to be a priority
There have been endless discussions for years but theme inheritance still doesn't seem to be a thing. You can "inherit" from the simple theme so you don't have to have all the required files in your theme, but that's as far as it goes.
Con Not as powerful as other more popular site generators
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
Con Mostly blog oriented
Con Poor support community
A very poor support community, and a developer who is just way too sensitive to any feedback.
Con Limited
Very limited free themes, that really are quite useless. Other themes cost quite a bit of money.